“The taxi driver seemed embarrassed to find there was no one-not even a clerk behind the reception desk-waiting to welcome me. He wandered across the deserted lobby, perhaps hoping to discover a staff member concealed behind one of the plants or armchairs. Eventually he put my suitcases down beside the elevator doors and, mumbling some excuse, took his leave of me.The lobby was reasonably spacious, allowing several coffee tables to be spread around it with no sense of crowding. But the ceiling was low and had a definite sag, creating a slightly claustrophobic mood, and despite the sunshine outside the light was gloomy. Only near the reception desk was there a bright streak of sun on the wall, illuminating an area of dark wood panelling and a rack of magazines in German, French and English. I could see also a small silver bell on the reception desk and was about to go over to shake it when a door opened somewhere behind me and a young man in uniform appeared.'Good afternoon, sir,' he said tiredly and, going behind the reception desk, began the registration procedures. Although he did mumble an apology for his absence, his manner remained for a time distinctly off-hand. As soon as I mentioned my name, however, he gave a start and straightened himself.'Mr Ryder, I'm so sorry I didn't recognise you. Mr Hoffman, the manager, he was very much wanting to welcome you personally. But just now, unfortunately, he's had to go to an important meeting.''That's perfectly all right. I'll look forward to meeting him later on.'The desk clerk hurried on through the registration forms, all the while muttering about how annoyed the manager would be to have missed my arrival. He twice mentioned how the preparations for 'Thursday night' were putting the latter under unusual pressure, keeping him away from the hotel far more than was usual. I simply nodded, unable to summon the energy to enquire into the precise nature of 'Thursday night'.

„Criticize, to doubt, to probe the Germans is by now not only anti-German but apparently unAmerican. In eighteen years, we have turned an astonishing emotional and intellectual somersault. Have the Germans done anything of the sort? Is there a "New Germany," or is there simply another Germany? My acquaintance with Germany began in 1924 and continued until the end of the Nürnberg Trials, though from the summer of 1936 until American troops entered Germany during the war, I watched from a distance and listened to those who had escaped the fatherland. In these post-war years, while the United States has become officially more loving every minute toward its former enemy, I have been reading of this New Germany, and wondering. Last winter I returned to West Germany to try to find what must be New Germans, those who were children or newly born at the end of the Second World War, so young then as to be untouched by the poison their people fed on for twelve years.I had one introduction, to a Hungarian journalist established in Germany after the Hungarian revolution of 1956. My plan was to visit universities; I meant to meet Germany's future rulers. Hitler was a freak in German history in the sense that he was semiliterate; Germany is normally directed by university graduates, and the academic title Doctor has always abounded in German governmental circles. From the University of Hamburg, through those of Free Berlin, Frankfurt, Bonn, and Munich, I was passed along by students, either casually met or introduced by the student self-government in each university. We were strangers, they having no ideas about me and I no ideas about them. There was nothing official in this tour. I would wander into a student government office and chat with anyone I could find, and in turn they whistled up anyone they could find with spare time and a wish to talk; though I did try to meet all kinds, ranging from socialist to nationalist to don't-know.“

„She began asking questions so brusquely and giving orders so decisively Pork's eyebrows went up in mystification. Miss Ellen didn't never talk so short to nobody, not even when she caught them stealing pullets and watermelons. She asked again about the fields, the gardens, the stock, and her green eyes had a hard glaze which Pork had never seen in them before. "Yas'm, dat hawse daid, layin' dar whar Ah tie him wid his nose in de water bucket he tuhned over. No'm, de cow ain' daid. Din' you know? She done have a calf las' night. Dat why she beller so." "A fine midwife your Prissy will make," Scarlett remarked caustically. "She said she was bellowing because she needed milking." "Well'm, Prissy ain' fixing to be no cow midwife, Miss Scarlett," Pork said tactfully. "An' ain' no use quarrelin' wid blessin's, cause dat calf gwine ter mean a full cow an' plen'y buttermilk fer de young Misses, lak dat Yankee doctah say dey'd need." "All right, go on. Any stock left?"

Scene uit de film 'Gone with the wind'

"No'm. Nuthin' 'cept one ole sow an' her litter. Ah driv dem inter de swamp de day de Yankees come, but de Lawd knows how we gwine get dem. She mean, dat sow." "We'll get them all right. You and Prissy can start right now hunting for her." Pork was amazed and indignant. "Miss Scarlett, dat a fe'el han's bizness. Ah's allus been a house nigger." A small fiend with a pair of hot tweezers plucked behind Scarlett's eyeballs. "You two will catch the sow -- or get out of here, like the field hands did." Tears trembled in Pork's hurt eyes. Oh, if only Miss Ellen were here! She understood such niceties and realized the wide gap between the duties of a field hand and those of a house nigger. "Git out, Miss Scarlett? Whar'd Ah git out to, Miss Scarlett?" "I don't know and I don't care. But anyone at Tara who won't work can go hunt up the Yankees. You can tell the others that too." "Yas'm."

„In the population of Transylvania there are four distinct nationalities: Saxons in the South, and mixed with them the Wallachs, who are the descendants of the Dacians; Magyars in the West, and Szekelys in the East and North. I am going among the latter, who claim to be descended from Attila and the Huns. This may be so, for when the Magyars conquered the country in the eleventh century they found the Huns settled in it.

I read that every known superstition in the world is gathered into the horseshoe of the Carpathians, as if it were the centre of some sort of imaginative whirlpool; if so my stay may be very interesting. (Mem., I must ask the Count all about them.)

I did not sleep well, though my bed was comfortable enough, for I had all sorts of queer dreams. There was a dog howling all night under my window, which may have had something to do with it; or it may have been the paprika, for I had to drink up all the water in my carafe, and was still thirsty. Towards morning I slept and was wakened by the continuous knocking at my door, so I guess I must have been sleeping soundly then.

I had for breakfast more paprika, and a sort of porridge of maize flour which they said was 'mamaliga', and egg-plant stuffed with forcemeat, a very excellent dish, which they call 'impletata'. (Mem., get recipe for this also.)

I had to hurry breakfast, for the train started a little before eight, or rather it ought to have done so, for after rushing to the station at 7:30 I had to sit in the carriage for more than an hour before we began to move.

It seems to me that the further east you go the more unpunctual are the trains. What ought they to be in China?

All day long we seemed to dawdle through a country which was full of beauty of every kind. Sometimes we saw little towns or castles on the top of steep hills such as we see in old missals; sometimes we ran by rivers and streams which seemed from the wide stony margin on each side of them to be subject to great floods. It takes a lot of water, and running strong, to sweep the outside edge of a river clear.

It was the cruelest winter. The winds were rabid off the rivers. Ice came down like poisoned darts. Four blizzards in January alone, and the snowbanks froze into gray barricades as grim and impenetrable as anything in war. Tombstones were buried across the cemetery fields and cars parked curbside were swallowed undigested. The long-term debate about changing weather was put aside for immediate concern for the elderly and the shut-ins, while the children went weeks without school. Deliveries came to a halt and the warehouses clogged up on days the planes were approved to land. There were lines at the grocery store, short tempers, a grudging toward the burden of adjustment. Some clever public services addressed the civic concerns — heat shelters, volunteer home checks. The cold was mother of invention, a vengeful mother whose lessons were delivered at the end of a lash.

The ride home was slow going because of the snow and the traffic. He usually worked by eyelet light but this evening he brought no work home and sat in one quadrant of the car without file opened or pen in hand. They were waiting for him. They didn't know they were waiting for him. The driver had on 1010 WINS, traffic and transit on the ones. Somewhere, out to sea or in the South, it might not be snowing. Here it slanted into the windshield like white ash from a starburst. The frostbite had returned to his fingers and toes. He unbuckled the seat belt and leaned over, stretching his long torso across the backseat, and what the driver thought he didn't care. The sound of the radio faded as one ear was sealed up by the distressed leather and he put a hand on the floor mat and ran his tingling fingertips over the fibertrapped pebbles. He hadn't called to tell them. He had lost his phone. They were waiting for him, but they didn't know it.

“1935 / Constantine, eight years old, was working in his father‘s garden and thinking about his own garden, a square of powdered granite he had staked out and combed into rows at the top of his family‘s land. First he weeded his father‘s bean rows and then he crawled among the gnarls and snags of his father‘s vineyard, tying errant tendrils back to the stakes with rough brown cord that was to his mind the exact color and texture of righteous, doomed effort. When his father talked about "working ourselves to death to keep ourselves alive," Constantine imagined this cord, coarse and strong and drab, electric with stray hairs of its own, wrapping the world up into an awkward parcel that would not submit or stay tied, just as the grapevines kept working themselves loose and shooting out at ecstatic, skyward angles. It was one of his jobs to train the vines, and he had come to despise and respect them for their wild insistence. The vines had a secret, tangled life, a slumbering will, but it was he, Constantine, who would suffer if they weren‘t kept staked and orderly. His father had a merciless eye that could find one bad straw in ten bales of good intentions.

As he worked he thought of his garden, hidden away in the blare of the hilltop sun, three square feet so useless to his father‘s tightly bound future that they were given over as a toy to Constantine, the youngest. The earth in his garden was little more than a quarter inch of dust caught in a declivity of rock, but he would draw fruit from it by determination and work, the push of his own will. From his mother‘s kitchen he had spirited dozens of seeds, the odd ones that stuck to the knife or fell on the floor no matter how carefully she checked herself for the sin of waste. His garden lay high on a crown of scorched rock where no one bothered to go; if it produced he could tend the crop without telling anyone.”

“The two transports had sneaked up from the south in the first graying flush of dawn, their cumbersome mass cutting smoothly through the water whose still greater mass bore them silently, themselves as gray as the dawn which camouflaged them. Now, in the fresh early morning of a lovely tropic day they lay quietly at anchor in the channel, nearer to the one island than to the other which was only a cloud on the horizon. To their crews, this was a routine mission and one they knew well: that of delivering fresh reinforcement troops. But to the men who comprised the cargo of infantry this trip was neither routine nor known and was composed of a mixture of dense anxiety and tense excitement.Before they had arrived, during the long sea voyage, the cargo of men had been cynical--honestly cynical, not a pose, because they were part of an old regular division and knew that they were cargo. All their lives they had been cargo; never supercargo. And they were not only inured to that; they anticipated it. But now that they were here, were actually confronted with the physical fact of this island that they had all read so much about in the papers, their aplomb deserted them momentarily. Because though they were from a pre-war regular division, this was nevertheless to be their baptism of fire.As they prepared themselves to go ashore no one doubted in theory that at least a certain percentage of them would remain on this island dead, once they set foot on it. But no one expected to be one of these. Still it was an awesome thought and as the first contingents came struggling up on deck in full gear to form up, all eyes instinctively sought out immediately this island where they were to be put, and left, and which might possibly turn out to be a friend's grave.The view which presented itself to them from the deck was a beautiful one. In the bright, early morning tropic sunshine which sparkled off the quiet water of the channel, a fresh sea breeze stirred the fronds of minute coconut palms ashore behind the dun beach of the nearer island. It was too early yet to be oppressively hot. There was a feeling of long, open distances and limitless sea vistas. The same sea-flavored breeze sifted gently among the superstructures of the transports to touch the ears and faces of the men. After the olfactory numbness caused by the saturation of breath, feet, armpits and crotches below in the hold, the breeze seemed doubly fresh in their noses. Behind the tiny cocopalms on the island masses of green jungle rose to yellow foothills, which in turn gave place in the bright air to hulking, blue-hazed mountains.“

My eyes have never seen the moon so lovely as to-night;In silence wrapt she is the breathless music of the night.Moonbeams embroider shadows with fine thread of silver light.O, eyes have never seen the sky so lovely as to-night!The moon adorned in beams of pearls seems like a queen divine,The stars like fire-flies tangled in a web about her shine.The Mtkvari flows a silver stream of lambent beauty bright.O, eyes have never seen the moon so lovely as to-night!Here in immortal calm and peace the great and noble sleepBeneath the soft and dewy turf in many a mouldering heap,Here Baratashvili came with wild desires to madness wrought,Oppressed by raging fires of passion and perplexing thought.O could I like the swan pour forth my soul in melodyThat melts the mortal heart and breathes of immortality!Let my free song fly far beyond this world to regions highWhere on the wings of poesy 'twill glorify the sky.If death approaching makes the fragrance of the roses sweeter.Attunes the soul to melodies that make all sadness dearer.And if the swan's song thus becomes a denizen of heaven,If in that, song she feels that death will be but ecstasy, then —Let me like her sing one last song and in death find delight.So breathless still and lovely I have never seen the night!O mighty dead, let me die here beside you as I sing.I am a poet, and to eternity my song I fling,And let it be the fire that warms and lights the spirit's flight.O, eyes have never seen the moon so lovely as to-night!

„On the stern, pine-clad southern coast of Norway, off thepicturesquely-situated town of Arendal, stand planted far out into thesea the white walls of the Great and Little Torungen Lighthouses, each on its bare rock-island of corresponding name, the lesser of whichseems, as you sail past, to have only just room for the lighthouse andthe attendant's residence by the side. It is a wild and lonelysituation,--the spray, in stormy weather, driving in sheets against thewalls, and eagles and sea-birds not unfrequently dashing themselves todeath against the thick glass panes at night; while in winter all communication with the land is very often cut off, either by drift orpatchy ice, which is impassable either on foot or by boat. These, however, and others of the now numerous lights along thatdangerous coast, are of comparatively recent erection. Many persons nowliving can remember the time when for long reaches the only lighting wasthe gleam of the white breakers themselves. And the captain who had passed the Oxö light off Christiansand might think himself lucky if hesighted the distant Jomfruland up by Kragerö. About a score of years before the lighthouse was placed on Little Torungen there was, however, already a house there, if it could be dignified by that name, with its back and one side almost up to the eave of the roof stuck into a heap of stones, so that it had the appearance of bending forward to let the storm sweep over it. The low entrance-door opened to the land, and two small windows looked out upon the sea, and upon the boat, which was usually drawn up in a cleft above the sea-weed outside.

When you entered, or, more properly speaking, descended into it, there was more room than might have been expected; and it contained sundry articles of furniture, such as a handsome press and sideboard, which no one would have dreamt of finding under such a roof. In one corner there stood an old spinning-wheel covered with dust, and with a smoke-blackened tuft of wool still hanging from its reel; from which, and from other small indications, it might be surmised that there had once been a woman in the house, and that tuft of wool had probably been her last spin.“

„The Franciscan Order (Friars Minor) was founded by the Poverello of Assisi (1182-l226) in the little church of Portiuncula in 1209. It was given oral approval by Pope Innocent III in 1210, and the Rule was formally approved by Pope Honorius III in 1221.

Francis found himself one day in Bishop Guido's private room. As was customary with him, he had gone to the man he regarded as "the father of souls" to get advice-perhaps also to pray for alms. It was a period of hard times for the Brotherhood. After the return from the mission journeys, four new Brothers had joined the ranks-Philipp Lungo, John of San Costanzo, Barbarus, and Bernard of Vigilanzio. Francis himself had brought a fifth new Brother with him from Rieti-Angelo Tancredi, a young knight whom Francis had met in the streets of Rieti, and whom he had won by suddenly calling out to him: "Long enough hast thou borne the belt, the sword and the spurs! The time has now come for you to change the belt for a rope, the sword for the Cross of Jesus Christ, the spurs for the dust and dirt of the road! Follow me and I will make you a knight in the army of Christ!"

Thus it was that there were no longer so few men to have food daily. In the beginning the people of Assisi had been seized with a kind of wonder, and the Brothers had got considerable alms as they went from door to door. Now people began to grow weary of them; now the relatives of the Brothers were ready to persecute them. "You have given away what you had, and now you come and want to eat up other people's things!"

“My father told me I was a hurricane baby. This didn’t mean I was born in the middle of one. July 4, 1950, the day of my birth, fell well before hurricane season.He meant I was conceived during a hurricane. Or in its aftermath. “Stop that, Edwin,” my mother would say, if she overheard him saying this. To my mother, Connie, anything to do with sex, or its consequences (namely, my birth, or at least the idea of linking my birth to the sex act), was not a topic for discussion.But if she wasn’t around, he’d tell me about the storm, and how he’d been called out to clear a fallen tree off the road, and how fierce the rain had been that night, how wild the wind. “I didn’t get to France in the war like my brothers,” he said, “but it felt like I was doing battle, fighting those hundred-mile-an-hour gusts,” he told me. “And here’s the funny thing about it. Those times a person feels most afraid for their life? Those are the times you know you’re alive.” He told me how, in the cab of his truck, the water poured down so hard he couldn’t see, and how fast his heart was pounding, plunging into the darkness, and how it was, after—outside in the downpour, cutting the tree and moving the heavy branches to the side of the road, his boots sinking into the mud and drenched from rain, his arms shaking.“The wind had a human sound to it,” he said, “like the moaning of a woman.”Later, thinking back on the way my father recounted the story, it occurred to me that much of the language he used to describe the storm might have been applied to the act of a couple making love. He made the sound of the wind for me, then, and I pressed myself against his chest so he could wrap his big arms around me. I shivered, just to think of how it must have been that night. For some reason, my father liked to tell this story, though I—not my sisters, not our mother—was his only audience. Well, that made sense perhaps. I was his hurricane girl, he said. If there hadn’t been that storm, he liked to say, I wouldn’t be here now.

It was nine months later almost to the day that I arrived, in the delivery room of Bellersville Hospital, high noon on our nation’s birthday, right after the end of the first haying season, and just when the strawberries had reached their peak.“

„Such kindliness and courtesy seemed to come naturally from him as the light from a lamp which shines with equal radiance on all objects.

They went out to the garden terrace and sat down on the steps. Lida sat on a lower one, listening in silence to her brother. At her heart she felt an icy chill. Her subtle feminine instinct told her that her brother was not what she had imagined him to be. In his presence she felt shy and embarrassed, as if he were a stranger. It was now evening; faint shadows encircled them. Sanine lit a cigarette and the delicate odour of tobacco mingled with the fragrance of the garden. He told them how life had tossed him hither and thither; how he had often been hungry and a vagrant; how he had taken part in political struggles, and how, when weary, he had renounced these.

Lida sat motionless, listening attentively, and looking as quaint and pretty as any charming girl would look in summer twilight.

The more he told her, the more she became convinced that this life which she had painted for herself in such glowing colours was really most simple and commonplace. There was something strange in it as well. What was it? That she could not define. At any rate, from her brother's account, it seemed to her very simple, tedious and boring. Apparently he had lived just anywhere, and had done just anything; at work one day, and idle the next; it was also plain that he liked drinking, and knew a good deal about women. But life such as this had nothing dark or sinister about it; in no way did it resemble the life she imagined her brother had led. He had no ideas to live for; he hated no one; and for no one had he suffered. At some of his disclosures she was positively annoyed, especially when he told her that once, being very hard up, he was obliged to mend his torn trousers himself.

"Why, do you know how to sew?" she asked involuntarily, in a tone of surprise and contempt. She thought it paltry; unmanly, in fact.

"I did not know at first, but I soon had to learn," replied Sanine, who smilingly guessed what his sister thought.

The girl carelessly shrugged her shoulders, and remained silent, gazing at the garden. It seemed to her as if, dreaming of sunshine, she awoke beneath a grey, cold sky.“

„The man got the bundle off the horse and over his shoulder and came walking from behind the animal in a kind of stagger. Inman could see that what he was lugging was a woman, one limp arm swinging, a cascade of black hair brushing the ground. The man carried her from out the diameter of torchlight so that they became near invisible, but his direction was clearly toward the verge of the drop-off. Inman could hear the man sobbing in the dark as he walked.

Inman ran along the road to the torch and grabbed it up and pitched it softly underhand out toward the sound of crying. What the fire lit when it struck ground was the man standing on the very lip of the bluff with the woman in his arms. He was trying to whirl to see the source of this sudden illumination, but, cumbered as he was, it took some time. With a kind of shuffle, he turned to face Inman.

--Set her down, Inman said.

She dropped in a heap at the man's feet.

--The hell kind of pistol is that? the man said, his eyes fixed on the two big mismatched bores.

--Step away from her, Inman said. Get over here where I can see you.

The man stepped across the body and approached Inman. He held his head tipped down for the hat brim to cut the glare from the torch.

--Best stop right now, Inman said, when the man got close.

--You're a message from God saying no, the man said. He took two steps more and then dropped to his knees in the road and fell forward and hugged Inman about the legs. Inman leveled the pistol at the man's head and put pressure on the trigger until he could feel all the metal parts of its firing mechanism tighten up against each other. But then the man turned his face up, and it caught the light from the torch where it still burned on the ground, and Inman could see that his cheeks were shiny with tears. So Inman relented as he might have anyway and only struck the man a midforce blow across the cheekbone with the long barrel of the pistol.“

Uit: Balsamic Dreams: A Short but Self-Important History of the Baby Boomer Generation

“Throughout history, generations imbued with a messianic complex have inspired a wide range of powerful emotions. The Jacobins who decapitated Louis XVI inspired dread. The insurgents led by George Washington inspired admiration. The twentysomething barbarians who accompanied Genghis Khan on his pitiless campaigns through Central Asia and Eastern Europe inspired despair, the young Germans who put Hitler's name in lights inspired horror, the fresh-faced Frenchmen and Frenchwomen who built the cathedrals of Chartres and Amiens and Beauvais inspired awe. Baby Boomers fall into a somewhat different category. As convinced of their uniqueness as the Bolsheviks, as persuaded of their genius as the Victorians, as self-absorbed as the Romantics, as prosperous as the ancient Romans, the Baby Boomers, despite a very good start (the Freedom Riders, Woodstock, Four Dead in Ohio, driving Nixon from office, Jon Voigt in Midnight Cowboy), have never put many points on the historical scoreboard. Feared and admired in their youth, today they inspire little more than irritation. Not outright revulsion, not apoplectic fury, but simple, unadorned garden-variety irritation. With a bit of contempt thrown in on the side. The single most damning, and obvious, criticism that can be leveled at Baby Boomers is, of course, that they promised they wouldn't sell out and become fiercely materialistic like their parents, and then they did. They further complicated matters by mulishly spending their entire adult lives trying to persuade themselves and everybody else that they had not in fact sold out, that they had merely matured and grown wiser, thattheir values had undergone some sort of benign intellectual mutation. This only made things worse, because they had now compounded the sin of avarice with the sin of deceit. Besides, it was useless to deny their monstrous cupidity; banks keep records of this sort of thing.“

This wind that loiters among the quincesThis insect that sucks the vinesThis stone that the scorpion wears next to his skinAnd these sheaves on the threshing floorThat play the giant to small barefoot children.

The images of the ResurrectionOn walls that the pine trees scratched with their fingersThis whitewash that carries the noonday on its backAnd the cicadas, the cicadas in the ears of the trees.

Great summer of chalkGreat summer of corkThe red sails slanting in gusts of windOn the sea-floor white creatures, spongesAccordions of the rocksPerch from the fingers even of bad fishermenProud reefs on the fishing lines of the sun.

No one will tell our fate, and that is that,We ourselves will tell the sun’s fate, and that is that.

Drinking the sun of Corinth

Drinking the sun of CorinthReading the marble ruinsStriding across vineyards and seasSighting along the harpoonA votive fish that slips awayI found the leaves that the sun’s psalm memorizesThe living land that passion joys in opening.

I drink water, cut fruit,Thrust my hand into the wind’s foliageThe lemon trees water the summer pollenThe green birds tear my dreamsI leave with a glanceA wide glance in which the world is recreatedBeautiful from the beginning to the dimensions of the heart!

In the distance fades a rainbowOver the tips of the pyres,A tearful word of farewellIn the pouring rain.In the distance fades Chameria, our homeland in flamesAnd all of the roads take us northwards.Over ancient Epirotic lands moans a Mediterranean wind,Over the precious fields of our ancestors,Lightning now feeds on the abandoned pastures,Olive groves, unharvested, groan like the waves beating against the coast,And on all sides, Cham land,Enveloped in clouds,Gasps and drowns in blood and tears,ForsakenAnd forlorn.The bullets slicing through the darkness show us the way,Flames that have devoured the soil, light up our path,Behind us the storm lashes at the creaking doors of one-time homes.And the road stretches northwards, northwards forever.A folk now in exile, we wander in the downpour,Farewell Chameria!

Bust of a Slain Cham Boy

I will appear before you on a misty night,A looming silhouette of affliction and scorn.The wind and the stars will tell you nothing of me,Nor will the bronze glow of my silhouette.Only my wounds will bear witness,Only my death will declaim.

“Cuddles Houlihan got clipped by the vodka bottle as it exited the pneumatic tube.

"Goddammit!"

The cry of pain that filled the office came not from Cuddles, whose head still lay asleep on his desk, but from the tube. Its ultimate source was the office of Joe Harris, the editor-in-chief. At this late, sozzled hour, Harris had mistakenly fed the interoffice mail chute not the translucent canister containing his angry communication to Cuddles, but the still-half-full, six-dollar quart of hooch he was regularly supplied with by the countess in the fact-checking department.

Harris glowered for several seconds at the undispatched canister, before giving in to the impulse to open it up and look once more at what had enraged him in the first place: a photograph of Leopold and Loeb, smiling, each with an arm around the other, perched on the edge of an upper bunk in the Joliet State Prison, both of them avidly regarding the latest issue of Bandbox. The thrill killers held it open with their free hands, like a box of candy they were sharing on a back-porch swing.

Would make a great ad, said the inked message on the back of the photograph, whose bold penmanship Harris recognized as belonging to Jimmy Gordon, up until eight months ago his best senior editor here at Bandbox. "I think of you as a bastard son," he'd once told Jimmy in a burst of bibulous sentiment. Now, as editor-in-chief of Cutaway, the younger man was his head-to-head, hand-to-throat, competition. If Harris didn't think of something, this picture of those two murderous fairies reading Bandbox-the magazine that had made goddamn Jimmy Gordon, and remade Jehoshaphat Harris-would be plastered to the side of every double-decker bus crawling up Fifth Avenue.”

“THIS BOOK WAS BEGUN at a time when the threat of an unparalleled disaster hung over the heads of humanity—when a generation only just recuperating from the trauma of the Second World War discovered to its horror that a strange darkness, the portent of a war even more catastrophic and devastating than the last, was already gathering and thickening on the horizon. I began this book in the darkest years of a dictatorship that tyrannized two hundred million people. I began writing it in a prison designated as a "political isolation ward." I wrote it in secret. I hid the manuscript, and the forces of good—humans and otherwise—concealed it for me during searches. Yet every day I expected the manuscript to be confiscated and destroyed, just as my previous work—work to which I had given ten years of my life and for which I had been consigned to the political isolation ward—had been destroyed.I am finishing The Rose of the World a few years later. The threat of a third world war no longer looms like dark clouds on the horizon, but, having fanned out over our heads and blocked the sun, it has quickly dispersed in all directions back beyond the horizon.Perhaps the worst will never come to pass. Every heart nurses such a hope, and without it life would be unbearable. Some try to bolster it with logical arguments and active protest. Some succeed in convincing themselves that the danger is exaggerated. Others try not to think about it at all and, having decided once and for all that what happens, happens, immerse themselves in the daily affairs of their own little worlds. There are also people in whose hearts hope smoulders like a dying fire, and who go on living, moving, and working merely out of inertia.I am completing The Rose of the World out of prison, in a park turned golden with autumn. The one under whose yoke the country was driven to near exhaustion has long been reaping in other worlds what he sowed in this one. Yet I am still hiding the last pages of the manuscript as I hid the first ones. I dare not acquaint a single living soul with its contents, for, just as before, I cannot be certain that this book will not be destroyed, that the spiritual knowledge it contains will be transmitted to someone, anyone.“

She folded her arms and stared out the window into the night. "I don't understand, Nick. Why are we using a '91 Geo Prism for this?"

"I told you, you have to use a nondescript vehicle for pulling a robbery. And a '91 is about as nondescript as they get!"

Laurie turned and glared at me. "And what would you know about pulling a robbery? We've never done this before."

"True, but how hard could it be? I pull out the gun, ask for money and drive away."

"Ask for money??"

"Well yeah! I mean, with a gun in their face, will I really have to demand it? Besides, I think it's common courtesy to be polite while screaming obscenities and waving a gun in someone's face."

She eyed me suspiciously. "Have you been smoking banana peels again?"

By two in the morning we were sitting in our Geo in a parking lot across the street from a Sunoco gas station in Allen Park, MI. The station was deserted but still open. We watched for several minutes, but no one came or left the station. So far, everything was perfect.

"Do you really think you can pull this off?" she asked.

I flashed her a quick smile. "No one's as smooth as Nick Stone!"

When I was convinced there were no customers inside, I had Laurie pull the getaway Geo up to the Sunoco's front door, parking so close no one else could get inside the building. I put on my ski mask, grabbed Laurie's .38 snub-nose revolver and a cloth bag and went inside.

"Hi there!" was my congenial greeting to the girl behind the counter. "You know what I am," and I pointed to the ski mask, "you know what this is," I held up the gun, "and I assume you know what to do with this," I said, and tossed her the bag.”

“It whistles like a giant eagle screaming, so close now that I must cover my ears.

I have paddled by myself against the big river's current for many days to get here. No mind. My one living relation died in a faraway place, and I am here to greet his friend Elijah. Elijah Whiskeyjack is as close to a relation as I still have, and I will paddle him home.

Joseph Netmaker brought the letter out to me. Winter had just started to settle itself into the country. Joseph walked on snowshoes from the town. "This is for you, Niska," he said. "It is from the Canadian boss, their hookimaw."

As soon as I saw the brown letter, the English words written upon it, I knew what it contained. I sat down beside the fire and stirred at it with a stick while Joseph read, first out loud and in his stumbling English, then for me in our language.

Many moons later, when the winter ice was leaving and travel was difficult, Joseph came back with another letter. He explained that it was in reference to Elijah, and that Old Man Ferguson had given it to him to give to me since I was the closest thing to a relation that Elijah had.

The letter said that Elijah had been wounded, that he had only one leg now, that he had tried to rescue another soldier, was given a medal for bravery. It said that although weak, he had healed enough to travel and was expected to arrive in the same town from which he and Xavier had left so long ago.

I had Joseph explain to me how the wemistikoshiw calendar worked, what month I was to be there, and I made careful preparations to journey by canoe to that town where Elijah would arrive. I left early in the summer and paddled up the river. It was difficult. I am older now, but I travelled light. Joseph had asked to come along, but I told him no.“

„Volkova had them figured out right away: nice boys, not bad-looking boys, like a set of matching dolls, but they were "nothing but a bunch of teenagers." Volkova plays her own field: rich men. Lyapa & Co. were left to me. But all they were for me was "nothing but" too. I don't know why. Some "husband" I have!

"Shall I see you home?"

I decided to strike a pose and declared:

"I can get there on my own. I'm not a child!"

Lyapa and I live at opposite ends of town. I only have to go around the corner from Lyapa's place to the metro, but then I have to ride for almost an hour all the way over to

the Vyborg District. "Okay, but when you get there give me a call."

I didn't answer and slammed the door. Some husband...Hah! Just a messy situation.

Some young guy smashed out of his skull trailed after me from the bus stop — really tall, long hair and black glasses, clutching a bottle of Petrovskoe beer. I kept walking and kept my mouth shut, cursing Lyapa and cursing myself for wanting God knows what. Who's he to me anyway?

Meanwhile this lowlife has started grabbing at my arm and hassling me, raising his voice. I got frightened. He was drunk, after all.

A crowd of teenage kids appeared, coming toward us. Great, I thought. That's all I need. Then I'll send Lyapa to hell for sure, with a big bunch of roses.

The crowd came closer. Out in front of them this dirty little kid of about twelve was dancing around. He was the one who said it.

"It's him, guys!"

They separated Vova from me with a neat smack to his mouth. The bottle of beer swung loose out of Vova's hands and went flying into the air. I stood there and watched, stupefied, as several guys jumped up and down on Vova's head while the others put the boot into his gut.“